Suffocation
by rhapsodisiac
Summary: Squall goes ape on his word program, Dennis Leary style, because he was doing it in my head at four this morning and wouldn't let me sleep. SSZ. Rated for language.


Summary: Squall goes apeshit on his word program, Dennis Leary style, because he was doing it in my head at four this morning and wouldn't let me sleep. Post- or mid-Convergence, no spoilers.  
  
Disclaimer (haven't done one of these in a while, bad me): Square owns the boys, I just mess around with them and make them fall in love.  
  
-o0OO0-o-0OO0o-  
  
Suffocation  
  
I've been sitting with this stupid laptop in front of me since six a.m., mulling over a thousand more applications like I do every other fucking day and although it's only noon I'm ready to hurl it across the room. Parents, begging, pleading with me in cover letters that are always too long about how great their kid is, how she or he is so much more studious than all the rest so please please just look over the attachments, all their little-league baseball trophies and spelling bee ribbons and recommendations from kindergarten teachers that prove they were oh-so-quiet during circle time, please let them in. No, idiots, your kid is just another fucking kid, like me and like you and probably isn't good enough to get within a mile of this place for all the high standards it has because of the popularity contest _you_ started in the first place.  
  
This isn't just a boarding school. We train killers here. What if your kid wants to be an assassin, body and soul up for hire to the highest bidder instead of the nuclear-fucking-physicist you want him to be? You'll blame me, that's what you'll do, and go screaming and crying to the world news after I shoot your complaints to hell in the the middle of my sunshiny office. I'll mail you a cheque to cover the funeral, have a nice day, it's not my fault you didn't know what you were getting into.  
  
I'm fucking sick of this job. I didn't even want it when I was supposed to be tactician, and now that's the last thing I am. I'm a babysitter for a bunch of whiny fucking children. I hate them. I hate this.   
  
So I open up GardenWord 14.2 and make it shoulder my burdens with the hope it'll take them off mine, and all I'm getting out of this is a sinking feeling that I should apologize. To a computer.   
  
Fuck.  
  
I know what this is. It takes a lot to get me disgruntled enough to take it out on a machine. It's because I'm alone. All day, I've been alone.   
  
Zell's not bitching about my hair clogging the drain from the bathroom, or sitting silent on the carpet staring up at me with those big unnerving baby blues that make me feel so comfortable. He's not gushing about the girl who finally punched out the guy that was bullying her, in his gym class, such and honor, and how he hopes Seifer won't give her too many detentions for it because really, hot-damn, that kid deserved it. He's not even sleeping, no weepy little snores creeping down the hall from my room.  
  
Seifer's not here to crank up his classical piano on the stereo. He isn't sitting on the far end of the couch when I _know_ it's just so he can sneak and shift his way to my side over the course of an hour without my noticing. He thinks I don't notice. I always notice. And by the time he gets within a foot of me my heart's thudding so loud I can't think but I keep tapping away on the keys and moving the scroll bar like I'm reading just so he doesn't know. I _want_ him to get that self-satisfied smirk on his face and I _want_ to knock it right back off when the first touch makes me jump even though I've been expecting it all along.   
  
He thinks he's muscling me to lean into his chest when he does that, but he never notices how willingly I turn and lift my feet up onto the couch. It's so much easier to work when he's breathing against my back, when I'm settled between his legs, and it's not just because resting my elbows on his knees soothes the carpal tunnel syndrome. Knowing I can put down the laptop and turn around whenever it gets to be too much keeps me from needing to. I get more done when we sit like that than I could in a week in my office.  
  
I wish they were here, yelling at each other in the kitchen over something completely insignificant just to remind me that I'm not the only one that wants to scream.  
  
But they're not.   
  
I wish there were birds outside. I wish the faucet was old enough to drip. I wish one of them left a CD here, I don't care if it's Zell's godawful techno rap stuff or Seifer's _Elevator Hits Volume Six_, just one, anything so I could put it on now and close my eyes. I'm doing a whole damn lot of wishing today but I'm allowed. It's all I _can_ do when the silence is so thick I can't breathe.

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End file.
